While Dahmer was a teenager, he experienced fantasies of killing and mutilating men. He committed his first murder in Bath township, Ohio, in 1978. A second murder followed in 1987, and during the next five years he killed another 15 boys and young men, most of them in Milwaukee, WisconsinWis. Although other serial murderers had claimed far more victims, Dahmer’s crimes were particularly gruesome, involving cannibalism and necrophilia. In February 1992 Dahmer was sentenced to 15 consecutive life terms; a 16th consecutive life sentence was added in May for the murder he committed in 1978. Dahmer was murdered by a fellow inmate in a Wisconsin prison in 1994.

The circumstances of the crimes generated political became the subject of much controversy. Some claimed that the fact that Dahmer had escaped detection for so long showed that police attached a low priority to investigating the disappearance of victims who were homosexual or members of racial minority groups.

Popular interest in serial murder was stimulated by Dahmer’s case and by the release of the serial-murder film The Silence of the Lambs in 1991. During the next few years, serial-murder themes proliferated in popular culture both in North America and elsewhere, and Dahmer came to be regarded as among the most notorious serial murderers in history. Dahmer was murdered by a fellow inmate in a Wisconsin prison in 1994.